The documents to keep available

An employee leaves the business with a final settlement of €2,840. At least three documents must go with it, and a fourth is added where the business runs a savings scheme. None is sent automatically: they are kept available on the premises, and that nuance changes everything in a dispute.

Four documents, depending on the business

On termination or expiry of a contract of employment, however it ends, the employer keeps available to the employee a certificate of employment, a final settlement statement and an attestation intended for the body managing unemployment insurance.

A fourth document is added where the business offers an employee savings scheme: the summary statement of savings. It lists the sums and holdings the employee has, which they will need in order to decide whether to keep or transfer them.

These duties depend neither on the reason for termination nor on length of service. The end of a three-week fixed-term contract triggers them exactly as a dismissal after twenty years does, and an employee who left without notice is entitled to them like anyone else.

Each has its own statutory basis, which is why they follow different rules of form. The certificate of employment sits under one article of the labour code, the final settlement under another, and the unemployment attestation under a separate series of regulations.

The certificate of employment carries facts and nothing else: the identity of the parties, the dates of entry and exit, the posts held and the matching periods. Adding an appraisal to it, even a flattering one, takes it outside its purpose and hands both sides an argument that neither of them needed.

Collectible, not deliverable

The text says the employer keeps the documents available, not that they send them. The distinction is long-standing and has an immediate practical effect: an employee who does not come in cannot complain that the business failed to post their papers.

In practice most employers send the documents anyway, and they are right to. The cost of a recorded letter is trivial against the time spent showing, two years later, that the papers really were available at the front desk of the business.

Sending turns a passive duty into active proof. The acknowledgement dates the moment they became available, closes off any argument about delay, and incidentally spares the business chasing calls from a former employee assembling a benefit claim.

Where the business chooses not to send, a letter telling the employee that their documents are available, and from what date, achieves the same evidential effect at even lower cost. What counts is the trace, not the manner of delivery.

• Certificate of employment: dates of entry and exit, posts held
• Final settlement statement: inventory of sums paid at the end of the contract
• Attestation for unemployment insurance: opens the employee's entitlements
• Summary statement of employee savings, where a scheme exists in the business

What the final settlement itemises

The final settlement itemises the sums paid to the employee on the ending of their contract. It creates no right and extinguishes none by itself: it is a summary document, whose value lies entirely in being accurate.

It shows the last salary, the payment in lieu of untaken holiday, any termination payments and, where relevant, the payment in lieu of notice where the notice period was not worked at the employer's request.

The summary statement of employee savings deserves particular care, because it is the only one of these documents whose omission is never noticed. An employee unaware that they hold savings never asks for them, and the holdings simply carry on sitting with the account keeper without their knowing anything about it.

The commonest error concerns holiday. The final settlement is often drawn from the payroll system's holiday balance without checking that the balance includes the entitlement accrued during the notice period, whether or not that period was worked.

A second error is omitting rest days accrued under a working-time arrangement. They do not always sit in the same balance as ordinary holiday, and their omission usually comes to light through a written complaint.